This Restaurant's Extremely Sexual Menu Is A Huge Hit

There's a good chance you'll hear a lot of giggling when you sit down for dinner at the Manhattan Italian spot Giulietta's Cantina Club. No, it's not because the waiter just slipped and dropped an entire tray of pasta. And it's not because the guy at the table next to you has toilet paper trailing from his shoe. It's what's written on the menu that has people laughing: words that you usually don't see listed next to "carpaccio" and "lamp chop," like "sexual desires," and "phallic," and "libido enhancement."

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The made-you-blush language is part of the restaurant's Aphrodisiac Menu, which boasts six dishes meant to get you in the mood to … you know. The listings started as tongue-in-cheek Valentine's Day specials, but they were such a hit (in the dining room, at least) that chef and owner Mike Greco decided to make the food a permanent fixture. "The dishes make up 30 percent of our food sales every week," says Greco, adding that a lot of the couples who come in like to tell each other what to order.

Courtesy of Giulietta's Cantina Club

For a lot of them, that's the oysters. History and science, if you believe a couple half-baked studies, have told us they're an easy way to get your partner into bed. The joke's not at all lost on Greco, who serves the bivalves fire-roasted with pinot grigio sauce. Maybe they're so popular because people know and love oysters — or maybe it's because below their description, the menu's annotated with this fact: "Documented as an aphrodisiac by the Romans in second century A.D., as mentioned in a satire by Juvenal, he described the wanton ways of a woman after drinking wine and eating giant oysters."

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If you're wondering what came first, the aphrodisiac or the Italian twist, Greco's focus was always your pleasure. "I wanted to take ingredients that were either medically proven or had strong historical and philosophical links to being aphrodisiacs," he explains. "The next step was to create classic regional Italian dishes out of the ingredients." Alongside oysters, you'll see grilled asparagus (eating the phallic-shaped veggie three days in a row apparently has a powerful effect), shrimp with fennel (the root was used to boost libido in Ancient Egypt), carpaccio with mustard sauce (mustard stimulates sexual glands), garlic langoustino (the heat in garlic stirs sexual desires, apparently), and lamp chop with basil (the herb's supposed to boost fertility).

Courtesy of Giulietta's Cantina Club

In just a couple months, it's incited a whole lot more than chuckles. Three couples have gotten engaged in the restaurant since the menu was introduced. "They caught me off guard!" Greco says, though it shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise to him. Giulietta's was designed with romance in mind and is meant to echo the allure of those tiny, dreamy towns you find throughout Italy. The restaurant's tagline is "a love affair of food and wine," and even its name is a nod to the world's most notorious star-crossed lover: Juliet. (Yes, the Juliet from Romeo and Juliet.)

Greco's already thinking of new ways to riff on popular aphrodisiacs, and the timing lines up for anyone courting a spring fling: Giulietta's will be introducing a new menu later this season.

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